For several years, the upstate New York grassroots organization Coalition of Animal Rights Enthusiasts (CARE) has been urging the Glens Falls Collaborative to cancel its annual chicken wing festival, “Wing Fest,” and replace it with a Vegan Spring Festival. We are saddened that each April the Collaborative and the city of Glens Falls celebrate the suffering and killing of sweet, sensitive, sentient beings through a degrading wing-eating contest and an offensive event logo depicting a live, bodiless chicken with wings floating in space.

If we want to achieve social transformation, we must convince the public of the immorality of animal farming and make it common knowledge that killing animals for gustatory pleasure is not acceptable.

CARE worked to do that during this year’s protest by writing letters to the editor, mailing participating restaurants informational letters and pamphlets about chickens, and creating and circulating a petition with the help of United Poultry Concerns. My Letter to the Editor was published in The Post-Star on April 21, 2026, and read in part:

Wing Fest is a festival dedicated to the celebration of chicken suffering and the destruction of the planet. What the Collaborative is doing is called greenwashing, which is "essentially when a company or organization spends more time and money on marketing themselves as being sustainable than on actually minimizing their environmental impact (earth.org)." ... Don't let the Collaborative gaslight you into thinking they care about the environment. If they did, they wouldn't host the annual Wing Fest.

The night before the event, we chalked the sidewalks around the festival site with the message: “Chickens suffer.” This simple and truthful statement must have struck a nerve, because when we arrived at the protest the next day, someone had scrawled over our words with mocking phrases such as “Chickens Suffer (from deliciousness)” and “Chickens Taste Super.” Whoever did this would not have gone to the trouble of covering all our messages with cruel humor if what we wrote were not true.

We want this kind of counterprogramming to grow wherever Wing Fests are held. Nothing will change unless we change the narrative. We need to put these messages into the public sphere and force people to confront the issue: are you for the abuse of animals, or against it?

Chickens are the most abused land animals exploited on factory farms. Because of this, we are working to build a movement of activists willing to educate the public, leaflet, and protest at local chicken wing festivals. If you see one of these events scheduled in your area, please add your voice and help grow the movement.